SAN DIEGO, CA — “Magicians” actress Stella Maeve says her on-screen partner Mackenzie Astin helped her emotionally prepare for a sexual assault scene in Season 1 of the SYFY show.

“It was really important to do it and to ground it and then also give it levity and be honest with it,” Maeve, who plays Julia on the show, told the audience during the “Magicians” Comic-Con panel in San Diego on Saturday. “It was so nice to get to work with Mackenzie Astin, who played Reynard, because he was so sweet when we had to shoot that scene.”

On the show, which has been dubbed the “Harry Potter” for grown-ups, Julia is assaulted by a trickster demon, Reynard the Fox.

Maeve said Astin would constantly ask her if she was OK.

“It was nice to have such a great partner to do it with and the way that John [McNamara] and Sera [Gamble] wrote it was just in a format that was easy and not easy, but wonderful to be able to translate that on screen in the way that they have formatted it, so I guess it was a collaborative effort in that we all put this together and tried to ground it and make it as real as possible, but also use fantasy to bring that levity,” she said.